“You've Been with the Professors”: Influence, Appropriation, and The

೿۰ૡഀ “You’ve Been with the Professors”: Influence, Appropriation, and the Cultural Interpretation of Bob Dylan Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America. New York: Doubleday, 2010. 390 pp., 99 bw illus., index. Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010. xx, 483 pp, 14 bw illus., index. Jeffrey L. Meikle )Vojwfstjuz!pg!Ufybt!bu!Bvtujo* American Studies as a discipline, at least as practiced in the United States, has sometimes attracted criticism that it encourages narcissistic navel-gazing by a culture whose socioeconomic base is affluent enough to afford that luxury. This complaint is especially prevalent in attacks on scholars who direct their attention to popular examples of the products of mass culture. A former colleague of mine, for example, often aimed sarcastic barbs at people who “write about their record collections.” At the least, he believed, such unprofessional scholars are too lazy to look beyond narrow personal interests; at worst, they project their own guilty pleasures onto the +FGGSFZ-.FJLMF larger culture in a solipsistic gesture motivated by self-justification. Although my colleague’s opinion reflected a bitter, ultimately dismissive attitude toward recent scholarship on contemporary mass culture, there is indeed a gray area where celebrity worship, fanboy obsession, and personal desire to claim cultural capital may blur traditional notions of scholarship’s neutral objectivity. Attempts to overcome such attacks often seek to prove by applying audience or reception theory that popular culture products do have substantive impact on the lives of those who consume them. That defense may appear questionable not only because reception is notoriously difficult to measure but also because critical theory’s densely-worded, jargon-laden arguments may seem like self-serving obfuscation to readers already inclined to be skeptical of serious claims for popular or mass culture. These issues afford a backdrop for reviewing two books about Bob Dylan, one written by Greil Marcus, the acclaimed rock critic whose work over forty years has advanced from comments about new musical releases to wide-ranging cultural history and criticism, and the other by Sean Wilentz, whose three-decade academic career as a social and political historian has recently moved toward freewheeling commentary of the sort practiced by more popular critics. In 2005, Wilentz and Marcus co-edited a collection of essays entitled The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad.1) Perhaps owing to their collaboration, Wilentz seems to have been inspired by Marcus’s free-associational style but at the same time has 1) Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus, eds., The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). �:PV�WF#FFOXJUIUIF1SPGFTTPST� striven to maintain scholarly objectivity of a sort that Marcus, despite his having adopted the trappings of academic scholarship, has never much worried about. While Marcus has become more academically inclined over time, Wilentz has become less bound by scholarly conventions. It seems appropriate that their interests have converged on Bob Dylan, a figure whose songs and performances owe their distribution to the media of mass culture but whose work over the past fifty years has often possessed a cultural significance transcending its commercial origin. Of the two authors, Marcus is the writer whose work is most closely associated with Dylan. The critic has met Dylan at least once, speaking with him briefly after an outdoor concert in New Jersey in 1963, at the beginning of the singer’s career. Overwhelmed by the performance that day, Marcus offered spontaneous praise to a person whose name he had not even caught during onstage introductions. Prior to the publication of the book under review here, Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010, a collection of record and concert reviews, longer analytical pieces, and brief mentions from such periodicals as Rolling Stone, Village Voice, and Interview, Marcus had published two other books about Dylan. The first was Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes,2) in which Marcus discussed a series of private recordings made by Dylan and the members of his backup group, later well known in their own right as The Band, as they jammed together in 1967 in a secluded house in the Catskill 2) Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), reprinted as The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New York: Picador, 2001) with the title the author originally wanted. +FGGSFZ-.FJLMF Mountains in upstate New York. There they worked through a series of old folk songs, obscure commercial tunes from the first half of the twentieth century, and new compositions that Marcus portrayed as having evolved naturally out of an old, weird, invisible, and ultimately forgotten stream of American vernacular creativity. Among its many virtues, Invisible Republic demonstrated Marcus’s ability to reconstruct the creative process of making new music as he listened attentively to a type of fugitive recording, widely distributed now as illegal bootlegs, that had never before been available. He relied just as much on in-house tapes from Columbia Records for his second Dylan book, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005), which reconstructed the recording-studio process yielding “Like a Rolling Stone,” a song the book’s jacket copy celebrated as “the signal accomplishment of modern music.”3) Both of Marcus’s earlier books on Dylan established the critic as an interpreter to be reckoned with, in the first instance for suggesting the songwriter’s connections to hidden springs of past American creativity, and in the second for revealing how, in a single song, he had expressed the impatient desires and ambivalences of the countercultural generation. In Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010, we find Marcus’s earliest expressions and frequent reworkings of these themes, allowing us to watch the evolution of Dylan’s most rewarding commentator, along with much elsesome of which would have been better left uncollected. While Marcus is an old Dylan hand, Wilentz approaches this 3) Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005). �:PV�WF#FFOXJUIUIF1SPGFTTPST� national cultural icon as a relative newcomer in print, though his involvement is also personal. In the introduction to Bob Dylan in America, the historian reveals that he learned of the singer at age thirteen, in 1964, through friends in a liberal Unitarian youth group, and that he attended a Dylan concert at Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center that same year. Although Wilentz became acquainted with Dylan’s early recordings through other fans, he takes pride in pointing out that his father and uncle owned the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, and that Dylan first met the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg late in 1963 in his uncle’s apartment over the shop. Unaware of that connection as a teenager, Wilentz experienced Dylan’s music as did many other fans, exhibiting enthusiasm when the singer shifted from acoustic folk to electrified rock for three influential albums during the mid-1960s, losing interest as Dylan’s career faded during the 1980s, and tuning in again during the early 1990s after Dylan released two albums of traditional folk songs rendered in a plain, unvarnished, harsh style reminiscent of the basement tapes and indicative of a concern for American roots that has marked the singer’s work ever since. Eventually Wilentz published an essay on Dylan in 1998, an act that brought him to the attention of the singer’s publicists, who asked him to write commentaries for www.bobdylan.com and eventually liner notes for an official release of a recording of the very concert he had attended as a teenager in 1964. Like Marcus, Wilentz seems compelled to share details of his involvement with Dylan’s work before getting down to the business of interpreting it. There seems a conscious desire to personalize his +FGGSFZ-.FJLMF connection to the artistwhether to gain the sympathy of the fans among his readers or, more probably, in the interest of full disclosure. Either way, Wilentz the historian, like Marcus the critic, is operating in that potentially impure gray area marking the intersection of popular culture with objective scholarship. Both these writers situate Dylan in the context of older American cultures that form the matrices from which his songs and music have sprung and discuss the intersections of his career with larger trends in American society. Emphasizing a national connection in his very title, Bob Dylan in America, Wilentz promises to explore two interrelated questions: “What does America tell us about Bob Dylan and what does Dylan’s work tell us about America?”4) However, Wilentz loses sight of this overriding intention for much of the book, focusing instead on moments in Dylan’s career that reveal his engagement with particular sources and his creative reworking of them, or that represent significant transition points other commentators have not emphasized. Wilentz’s treatment is thus episodic, though it moves for the most part chronologicallytoo mechanically so in a final section treating the first decade of this century, which witnessed a phenomenal resurgence of creativity as the singer, by then in his sixties, released three albums of new music, collaborated on the allegorical film Masked & Anonymous, published a volume of memoirs (Chronicles: Volume One), and served for three years as host of a weekly satellite radio program (Theme Time Radio Hour) all while maintaining a grueling concert schedule that fans refer to as 4) Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America, 8. �:PV�WF#FFOXJUIUIF1SPGFTTPST� “the never-ending tour.” Although this final group of chapters, entitled “Recent,” seems hurried, as if Wilentz felt he had to cover everything from an extraordinary decade, however briefly, he takes a more measured approach throughout the rest of the book.

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